“I thought when I’d make $200k I would be able to basically not worry about money at all,” she said, adding that she and her friends stopped going out to restaurants last year and shifted to potlucks and reality-TV nights.
Demand from professionals for affordable housing has exploded. This month, Varsha Madapoosi, 25, who lives in the Lower Pacific Heights neighborhood and works in financial technology, posted two open rooms in the four-bedroom, one-bathroom home she rents — going for around $1,200 and $1,500 a month — to a private Facebook group, attaching a Google form and leaving it open for 24 hours.
She received 88 responses immediately. In contrast, a single open room for about $1,400 drew 28 messages over four days last July.
“I have never seen this kind of response,” Ms. Madapoosi said.
Jolie Gan, 23, moved to San Francisco in January after completing a Fulbright fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She now has two jobs: working at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and writing for Core Memory, a technology and science publication, earning about $250,000 a year. She and her roommate have already moved three times in two months — in one case, they left an apartment that was misrepresented as a two-bedroom; another time, they departed a building that had black mold and rats.
At $250,000 a year, and with no student loan debt, Ms. Gan said she felt she could manage, even saving for retirement. But she said she saw the strain on friends who were earning below $200,000, for whom rent, utilities and groceries consume nearly everything that comes in.
